> I find it totally incomprehensible how anyone could possibly still use Windows seriously as a developer/hacker/programmer/interested in computing. Spoken lik

> I find it totally incomprehensible how anyone could possibly still use Windows seriously as a developer/hacker/programmer/interested in computing. Spoken like a true developer. I have one nit: I don't think anyone does use Windows for hacking. It's too locked down, too resource hungry, utterly opaque and the number of platforms it runs on can be counted on one hand. No one in their right mind would put Windows on a RPi. I'm not sure what Windows is now. It's not a particularly reliable, robust, light, secure or stable platform for the masses to run apps and games on. iOS, Android (and WinPhone in its day) do a far better job. It's far too heavy, expensive and inflexible to use as a server platform. That leaves one niche: the company wide computer system for companies that can't build their own. Windows is the king of the "company owned, controlled and monitored computer". Admittedly it's a huge market, and they own it. If there are competitors that aren't selling "rent all your computing resources on our cloud infrastructure", I can't see them. And the companies that have the wherewithal to build their own corporate computing structure are few and far between: Google, Facebook, Amazon and the like. You won't find the vast bulk of normal businesses such as Bridgestone, local hospitals or banks in that list. But equally, that market is ripe for the plucking. Microsoft does an appallingly bad job at it. To wit: most of the ransomware, and company owning (like Sony) are in fact failures in the security model Microsoft has sold these companies. If you look at the model Microsoft is peddling nowadays, it's almost the reverse of the best model we've developed so far, trustless. It's the "corporate locked down VPN" style, based on InTune. And it's not getting better. Microsoft's software engineering processes have been getting worse, as in the poor API documentation now regularly commented on here, the testing rates have dropped and the effect is noticeable, Windows just keep getting slower and bigger. (Admittedly many Linux distro's are also getting bigger and slower, but Linux has distro's pulling in both directions: feature rich but big and tiny but few features. Users: take your pick. Windows is headed in one direction only.) To add insult to injury, the companies are now being forced to rent computing resources from Microsoft's cloud for things like SSO (Azure AD), one drive storage, and even device control (InTune is cloud based). So Microsoft's corporate customers are being dragged toward a Google cloud like model where they rent every CPU cycle and byte of storage anyway. I thought Kim Jong-un's take down and complete ownership of Sony would be enough to trigger change away from the Microsoft model. Clearly it wasn't. Now I'm not sure what it will take.